Mcbeev.com - Brian McKeiver's Kentico CMS Blog

Introduction

One week from today (March 29th, 2018) I will once again be speaking at one of my favorite conferences of the year, Code PaLOUsa. CPL is a multi-day software development conference, located in Louisville, KY, designed to cover all aspects of software development regardless of technology stack. The conference schedule features presentations from many well-known professionals in the software development community.

I am pulling double duty with two sessions this year for the conference, "How to Build an E-commerce Chat bot with Azure Bot Framework" and "Serverless Architecture Shootout". The first talk about the Azure Bot Framework has me excited because it is the first time I have been able to give this talk, and I firmly believe that chatbots are an example of technology that every organization could use.

For the second talk about Serverless Architecture, I am calling in some backup to help me out (or crush… depending on how you look at it). Keep reading to find out more about both sessions and which special guest will debate me on the age-old discussion of who’s better at Serverless computing, Azure or AWS.

Attendees can expect to learn how to build and connect an intelligent bot to interact with an e-commerce website. See how you can use the Microsoft Bot Framework, Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS), and .Net Core to create a bot that can check a customer’s order history, order status, or tracking number.

We use bots all the time at our office and love them. However, they typically are “dumb” bots that handle simple notifications to our Slack channels. I wanted to create a bot that was a little bit more complex and a lot smarter than the standard fair. With that goal in mind, I came up the idea of making a sort of “self service” way for someone who has placed an order on a e-commerce site to come up with a way to check their order history and/or order status by chatting with an automated Bot. I also originally wanted the bot to work on Slack, and when I discovered that the Microsoft Bot Framework delivered that ability plus many more channels, it was “game on” from there. The smartness of the bot comes from the Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) that Microsoft Cognitive Services provides. After getting the project up and running I realized that this combination of technologies was down right amazing.

Also I will be presenting: Serverless Architecture Shootout, where this time I will be debating Bryan Soltis, Kentico Technical Evangelist and Azure MVP, on the pros and cons of different Serverless platforms and functions. The full abrstract is below:

Serverless architecture is a way of computing that allows you to build/run applications and services without thinking about servers. Join Brian McKeiver and Bryan Soltis as they compare & contrast two of the most popular serverless platforms, Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS, to find out which platform reigns supreme. The session will detail out how you can build a modern web site or web application that leverages a series of microservices as the main architecture. The microservices that will be compared and contrasted fall into the groups of Functions as a Service, Storage as a Service, Search as a Service, and even Headless CMS. All technologies that you can use to deliver sites to your customers faster.

If you are a seasoned veteran of Azure Functions or AWS Lambda, or brand new to the world of serverless, seeing the two platforms compared side by side might just give you a new point of view. At the very least, the goal of the session is to spark some interest in some new tools that will help you develop solutions that can seamlessly scale, deeply integrate, and deploy on demand. All of which gives you the power of the serverless advantage.

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About Brian McKeiver

I have over 17 years of experience in web development, mainly at BizStream. I'm passionate about software platforms and technologies that can help solve real world problems. I specialize in architecting solutions that use Kentico CMS, Kentico EMS, ASP.NET Content Management Systems, and the Microsoft Azure platform.

I enjoy hanging out with my wife, chasing around my three children and vigorously rooting for the Michigan State Spartans and Detroit Lions.